


The Blue Book of Small Stories

by Elsane



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-02 17:43:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5257742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsane/pseuds/Elsane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collected Silmarillion promptfic.</p><p>1:  Variations on a theme (light Fingon/Maedhros, 1000 words)<br/>2:  Imprisonment (Maedhros, Morgoth, 900 words)<br/>3:  Singing beside me in the wilderness (Fingon/Maedhros, 450 words)<br/>4:  Turtles (Argon, Fingolfin, 850 words)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Variations on a theme

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt, Maedhros/Fingon, "I've been checking you out."

I.

“ – letters are unnecessarily _rigid_ ,” the scholar was saying, forcefully enough that Maitimo, who had several minutes ago given up on paying close attention to her words, kept a wary eye on the wine slopping near the rim of her glass. “The act of writing shapes what is written, and thus they are pernicious! And your grandfather – ”

“Maitimo!” Findekáno said at his elbow. "There you are. I beg your pardon, Mistress, but his mother was asking for him – forgive us!“

The scholar made a sour face and waved them away, and with great relief Maitimo made his escape. Findekáno brought him neatly out of the crush in the great hall – he was nearly as adept at that as Maitimo was himself – and pulled him into the green study, one stair up. 

“My mother didn’t need me?” Maitimo said when the door had shut, just to be sure.

On the edge of the desk Findekáno sat, leaning back on his hands, and grinned at him. "You looked like you needed rescuing.“

Maitimo was grateful, truly so, but he shouldn’t be. "How did you know? I need to be – I mean, I thought I was being so polite!”

“You get this funny look around the corners of your eyes,” Findekáno said. "It’s like you’re trying to make a perfect custard out of your face and your eyes are the corners of the pan where it’s setting too quickly.“

Maitimo struggled not to laugh. "I beg you, cousin: never write songs! That’s the worst likeness I have ever heard.”

“Thank you, I try,” Findekáno said, and made a horrible face, waggling his tongue at Maitimo.

Maitimo did laugh, then, and went to mess up his hair, but Findekáno ducked, twisting toward him, and somehow it became a rough and one-armed hug instead.

Findekáno poked him hard in the ribs, Maitimo’s arm still around his shoulders. He looked distinctly pleased with himself. 

“I should go back down,” Maitimo said, after a while. He would be missed, but Findekáno’s shoulder was warm and comfortable against his chest; and Findekáno, laughing at his side, was something real and true, as the relentless swirl of formal smiles in the hall below had not been for a long time.

“Already?”

Maitimo looked down at him; his eyes were very bright. Maitimo’s mouth was dry. "Perhaps not quite yet.“

II.

He didn’t curse. He had promised himself, halfway through the third week, that he wouldn’t. It was useless, and it was churlish. Fingon had, past all hope and beyond all reason, rescued him; Fingolfin, leader of a battered host, yet sheltered him; his doctors had saved his life over and over again. He owed them something better than thrown bed pans and frustration. It was the first promise he had made in his new life, and so far he had not betrayed it.

Flinging his sword at Fingon’s feet would be nearly as satisfying. He managed not to do that either.

Instead, he closed his eyes. When he opened them, Fingon had stepped back into a ready stance, his blade level, his face still impassive.

“I don’t think this pass works left-handed.” That came out sounding very reasonable, which he was considering marking down as his victory for the day.

“There’s no reason it shouldn’t,” Fingon said. "On three?“

“No,” said Maedhros, and he was starting to sound much less reasonable, “we need to try a different countermove, this isn’t going to work – ”

“You’re turning too far on the upswing,” Fingon said. “You need to remember you don’t have a counterweight. Try again?”

He didn’t curse. He glared at Fingon. Fingon’s level gaze did not waver.

His left shoulder was aching. He rolled it, and shifted his sword in his grip, and ran through the parry in his mind again. 

He thought, May spiders suck your guts out through your nostrils. What he said was, “Three.”

III.

In the chamber that had been Fingolfin’s, the windows looked north. Maedhros had not seen this view by sunrise for more than four hundred years. He leaned his shoulder against the cold stone of the window frame, watching as dawn swept the long shadows of the mountains across the plain, and strained his eyes toward the point on the far horizon where the shadows would never lift.

There was a road, faint and silver in the dawn light, that had survived only because little else did, on Anfauglith that had been Ard-Galen. His father had ridden up it once, and he had, and now Fingolfin, and all they had won in the hard centuries among them was a surer knowledge of the malevolence that loomed, waiting, at the farther end.

“I see the only advantage of kingly hospitality is that I can now offer you better windows for brooding,” Fingon said from the bed.

Maedhros spun, and went to him. "I didn’t know you were awake.“

Fingon shrugged, a tiny motion, and Maedhros put a hand between his shoulderblades. Fingon’s eyes were still underlined with weariness. 

“You should sleep more,” Maedhros said. Fingon met his eyes, a tired, unspoken recognition in his glance, too rueful to be humour – how many times had Fingon said those exact words to Maedhros, in Himring? Maedhros flushed, and looked down. "You should.“

“We’ve been sleeping,” Fingon said. He squeezed Maedhros’ shoulder, and stood. "It’s past time to rise.”

We have no hope – he had said it to Fingolfin, in this room, by torchlight, when Fingolfin had demanded he explain why, oath-bound, war-mad border lord that he was, he yet would not support an assault on Thangorodrim. He could not say it to Fingon. Fingon had crossed to the window, and stood looking out.

“I have only just retaken Aglon,” Maedhros said; “at great cost.” It was as close as he could come.

“I know,” Fingon said. He said nothing else.

Maedhros joined him at the window. Fingon looked up, his mouth moving sideways in a bitter joke he did not share, and sank his head onto his shoulder.


	2. Imprisonment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morgoth and Maedhros on Thangorodrim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Morgoth, Maedhros, "Am I supposed to be scared?"

This time, when they dragged him out of his cell, they went up. It was orcs this time, big ones, and they took great glee in their familiar sport of tripping and shoving him as they went. Maedhros, long weary of this game, stumbled on impassively between them. But up, up was new, and at the foot of a rough and ill-lit stairway he looked up and wondered, with a creeping sense of dread, what it meant. Bats, he thought; bats, or spiders.

Two flights of stairs further, the orcs thrust him out onto a walkway high above the great gate of Angband. He staggered, as they had wanted, and caught himself on the battlement; and clung there, staring, wild for the view, for the glimpse of a wider world that was some distant kin to freedom. 

The air in his face was not clean. It was acrid, and the wind, when it came, carried an uglier reek; but it was still wind, and Maedhros took a deep and shaking breath. The sky was buried in fog. South, south toward Mithrim where his brothers surely still held their court, a road wound for a little way before vanishing in the grim and starless murk.

“You appreciate the view? That is well,” said Morgoth, behind him.

Morgoth’s voice, once he was no longer trying to be charming, was monstrous, heard with bones as much as with ears. Maedhros had heard it five times now, each worse than the last.

He turned, slowly. "It would be fairer by starlight.“

Morgoth stood upon the rampart before him, yet at the same time he was a towering shadow, a darker nexus in the dark fog, taller than the ramparts and terrible. The Silmarils gleamed in his crown, and cast his face into a darker shadow where only the glittering cruelty of his eyes was clear. 

He looked down at Maedhros, wordless; and Maedhros saw, in that moment, that all the brutality of the past years had been nothing more than idle amusement for Morgoth, and now his true purpose was to begin.

They had brought him from his cell unshackled; and it was a long way down from the ramparts.

He hesitated for a moment too long. 

“I think not,” Morgoth said, amused. 

With one vast black hand he reached out and picked Maedhros up. Maedhros cried out; the heat of Morgoth’s hand was terrible, not burning, but wrong, like a fever. 

Morgoth, vast as the twisted mountains, lifted him to the high peak of Thangorodrim. He pinned Maedhros against the mountainside with one hand, and with the other spun a thread of metal from the face of the rock. Maedhros struggled to see, but could catch only glimpses. It moved like molten iron, but the light glinting off the surface was cool, like steel but darker. Morgoth bent it around his wrist; it was still hot with the sick heat of Morgoth’s hand. Then Morgoth let go. The serene light of the Silmarils shone down around them. 

“Nothing of elven hand or mind can free you,” Morgoth said, “for this band was forged by forces past your reckoning, and is beyond your power to break or bend.”

He was to be a trophy, then, staked out as a victory banner in Morgoth’s foul war against his father. It would not be an easy death, but all in all it would be a clean one, and he had despaired of far worse. But Morgoth went on, “You shall not die of hunger, nor thirst, nor shall the bite of winter kill you, though you will starve, and shrivel, and beg the wind for surcease.”

He touched Maedhros’ forehead with his forefinger, and Maedhros’ whole body flinched. The shackle bit into the bones of his wrist. 

Morgoth’s smile was cruel, and the satisfaction in it was terrible. "Indeed your father was a master. Skilfully he wrought your fate, and gladly you chose it. Do you demand your inheritance of me, little king? Behold: here it is!“

In Morgoth’s mouth everything turned ugly. Yet it was true: Maedhros’ bonds were unbreakable by elven hand or will, and death would not release him.

"The Silmarils burn you,” he said, with the thin fierce anger of desperation. "So shall the sons of Fëanor!“

Morgoth laughed, and the cliffs around them splintered the sound into an echoing chorus of mockery.

He leaned in very close. "Long shall your father’s handiwork continue to delight me.” He ran a single blackened finger down Maedhros’ cheek, and was gone.

Maedhros swallowed down panic; took one deep breath; another. He tipped his head back against the rock.

The Silmarils had driven back the reeking fogs; the skies were clear above him. He had lost count of the years since he had last seen the free sky. The stars! Luminous, and fair, and living, as if the sky itself were breathing light; they struck him like an arrow to the chest, like a mallet to a gong.

“Elbereth – !” he cried out in anguish, but he had no words to ask her; he had cut himself off from all of them. 

_Long shall your father’s handiwork continue to delight me._

Morgoth lies, he reminded himself – Morgoth lies! 

His shoulder was already burning. The stars wheeled steadily, remotely, through the circles of the sky as the hours crept on, and between the stars the darkness was very black, and infinite.


	3. Singing beside me in the wilderness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fingon and Maedhros in the woods of Beleriand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Fingon/Maedhros, "Give me one reason why I should."

“Fingon,” Maedhros said, bouncing his knee. 

Fingon, his head in Maedhros’ lap, cocked an eyebrow, and showed not the slightest inclination to move.

“Lazy,” said Maedhros.

“Comfortable,” Fingon corrected. He grinned up at Maedhros briefly, before his gaze went dreamily back to the sky. Overhead the sunlight, long and golden in the late afternoon, fringed the beech leaves with glory.

Maedhros twined one of Fingon’s braids around his fingers and tugged it affectionately. It was beginning to come unraveled, but he could not fix it single-handed, not at this angle. He leaned back against the beech bole behind him, and watched the soft shifting breezes send bright sparkles over the lake below. 

A lark chattered overhead. Maedhros poked Fingon in the shoulder.

“If you want meat for your supper, we should get up.”

“I can have meat to board in any hall in Beleriand, and better seasoned,” Fingon said, and lifted one hand to spread his fingers against the brilliant sky – “this fair afternoon I will not have again.”

“As you will,” Maedhros said, laughing. He was stuck.

Once, long ago and a world away, he had gone with Fingon to the woods far south of Valimar, wild and pathless and entirely free of families, households, the endless hammering of the forge. Hunting had been the object, but they had done little of that, in the end; swimming, and racing, had been better, and after the longest race he had sat beneath an ancient oak tree with Fingon drowsing in his lap. He had only half-admitted to himself what he wanted from his cousin. He had plaited as many braids as good taste could justify into Fingon’s hair and one or two more beyond, and in the eternal suspended half-light he had sat for hours with both of his hands twisted into Fingon’s hair, hardly daring to breathe; afraid any move he made would be the wrong one, would disturb whatever private and halting magic this was, irretrievably.

The ground had been much less lumpy in Valinor.

Fingon’s face was graver now, even at rest, and his shoulders were broader. Maedhros ran his hand over those shoulders, familiar, solid, well beloved, and, his throat full of something he had no voice to say, put his thumb on Fingon’s lips. Fingon’s dreamy gaze came back to him, inquiring.

“Sit up so I can kiss you.”

“Oh, well, then!” Fingon sat in one easy movement and looped his arms around Maedhros’ neck. He kissed him hard and quick, and lay back down, pulling Maedhros down on top of him. He grinned up at Maedhros, laughter in his eyes.

“I see!” Maedhros said, and bent himself to kissing the smugness out of Fingon’s mouth.


	4. Turtles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Argon manages to get both into and out of trouble for reasons he doesn't completely understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt Argon, Fingolfin, "What are you hiding?"

Getting caught with the turtles had been more or less inevitable, but Arakáno did wish it had been his mother, and not his father, who had discovered him in the courtyard. Mother would have sat down beside him on the edge of the fountain and asked a relentless string of quiet, logical questions, like: Did you ask anyone before you put turtles in the fountain? What did he think the turtles were going to eat? Did he know what turtles liked to eat? Did he think that the turtles could find food in the fountain? Oh, had he been planning to bring them food regularly? What about cleaning up after them? – until he was squirming so badly that he couldn’t help agreeing to give the turtles away.

But Father – Father would ask where he got the turtles, and that was worse. He didn’t know _why_ it was worse, but it was very clear that it was.

Father sat down on the rim of the fountain beside him, noticed the turtle-sized palace that Arakáno had built in the water, and coughed. 

“Where did these fellows come from?”

“The woods above the big waterfall,” Arakáno said cautiously. That was easy enough.

“I thought you were going to go see Aikanáro today,” Father said.

“His tutor said he was too behind on his rhetoric.”

“Ah,” said Father. He nodded at the turtle in Arakáno's hands. "You’re scaring that one.“

“It won’t put its head out!” Arakáno said. This was a great frustration, and the unfairness of it burst from him in a great wash. "I made them a proper palace in the fountain with jewels and flowers and a waterfall, and I sang to them, and I brought them berries, but it still won’t put its head out!“

“Well, holding it upside down is not going to encourage it.” Father took the turtle from him. He held it in one hand and ran his other hand absently over the turtle’s shell, and, still looking at the turtle, said, “You didn’t go above the waterfall alone, did you?”

That was a trick question; he wasn’t supposed to. He mumbled, “No.” 

In Father’s hands, the front of the turtle’s shell slowly eased open, and a cautious snout poked out. His cousins had been able to coax the turtles out of their shells, too, with one easy slip of a finger along the crest of their shells. Arakáno stared back at the little beady eye in utter, accusing jealousy. 

“It’s not _fair_!”

“Justice –”

“– belongs not to one alone but to the several,” Arakáno said, singalong. Everyone quoted that at him, even Irissë. 

Father slid the turtle back into the fountain, where it kicked its way back to the depths of the waterspout and vanished behind the bright curtains of spray. 

“Was it Tyelcormo who took you into the woods?” Father’s questions were sharp, the ones that mattered, and flashed out swiftly; and there was something unhappy coiled behind this one, a feeling that made him brace for yelling.

In a small voice he said, “I went with Pityo and Telvo.”

Father looked off into the spray, his shoulders easing. Not yelling, then. But his shoulders and his mouth were still heavy with the same unhappiness, and it was clear that going up into the woods with Pityo and Telvo was bad.

No one explained; but whatever this wrongness was, it made his brilliant, laughing eldest brother turn hard and cold and fierce, it made his parents have quiet, angry discussions that stopped when they saw him, it turned Turukáno icy and proud, and Irissë scornful; it hung over the house like the shadow of a mountain he could not see.

“I like Pityo and Telvo,” he tried, hesitantly. "They’re nice.”

“They’re nice children,” Father agreed, but somehow that only made him more unhappy. 

One of the turtles lumbered off the roof of the little palace with a splash. Arakáno threw his slightly crushed berries into the fountain and watched them sink. The turtles didn’t even try to go after them. His insides felt cold, and all twisted up. He wanted to kick something.

Father sighed, and put his arm around Arakáno’s shoulders. "There are turtles in the ocean, did you know? Much bigger than these! Some of them are bigger than I am.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. Let’s go down tomorrow to Alqualondë and take a boat out to see them. We can bring your cousins along to help us sight them.”

“Yes!” said Arakano, hardly able to believe he was getting away this easily. No yelling, and the promise of more, better turtles. Maybe the sea turtles would be friendlier.

“Go take these poor turtles back where you found them. Tell Irissë I told her to take you.”

Arakáno screwed up his mouth. "Both of them?“

“All three of them, Arko.” Father was not impressed. "And clean up the fountain when you’re done.”

“I will!” Arakáno said, and set off for the house, quickly, before Father could decide to get angry at him after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I, uh, have a very bad habit of writing ludicrous things about [Argon-as-argon](http://berrysphase.tumblr.com/tagged/my-inability-to-cope-with-characters-named-after-chemical-elements), and there is a sneaky reference to the chemical element hidden in this fic. (I would like to state for the record how proud I am of keeping my disbelief suspended for the entire duration of this ficlet. This is one of the few times when I am unambiguously thankful for the existence of the Quenya names.)


End file.
